The Relationship Between Antigenic Structure and Immune Specificity

Abstract

There has built up over the years an accumulation of data dealing with the specificity of antigen-antibody interactions. Numerous studies, some utilizing admittedly ill-defined antigens, have made solid contributions to our knowledge concerning some of the structures and forces involved in immune interactions. These have been the subject of numerous reviews (Karush, 1962; Kaminski, 1965; Singer, 1965;Sela, 1966, 1967, 1969;Crumpton, 1967b;Kabat, 1966, 1968; Pressman and Grossberg, 1968; Goodman, 1969) and will therefore be given only cursory treatment herein. However, knowledge of the precise interrelationships involved in these interactions can best be derived from studies with antigens of defined structure. The present effort will be limited to coverage of selected protein antigens of known structure and/or sequence. It is not our intent to review the literature, but rather to focus our attention on several representative model proteins, in an attempt to extract from the diverse findings common denominators and to bring forth some unifying concepts dealing with various parameters of the immune response. We extend our apologies to those workers in the field whose contributions have not been included.